Facts about Woodrow Wilson

Wilson’s first stroke occurred while at Princeton in May 1906, seriously threatening his life. He experienced the Civil War in his youth. Young Thomas Woodrow Wilson was present in Georgia when Union troops entered his town and his mother tended to wounded Confederate soldiers.

Woodrow Wilson created his Fourteen Points laying out the goals that the United States and later other allies had for worldwide peace. He actually presented them in a speech given to a joint session of Congress ten months before the end of World War I.

Wilson was the first president to receive a PhD which he got in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University.

He only had a little over two years of political experience when he became President of the United States.

Wilson made the first live remote national radio broadcast. In November 1923, shortly before his death, Wilson spoke to a national audience just before Armistice Day from his Washington, D.C. home.

Wilson won easily in the Electoral College against the divided Taft and Roosevelt factions, but his 42% popular vote total was the third-lowest winning tally in history.

Wilson’s presidential papers and his personal library are at the Library of Congress.

Although Wilson tried to keep the United States out of World War I, he was unable to do so and was forced to ask Congress to declare war in 1917.

After his death, Wilson left his daughter Margaret an annuity of $2,500 annually for as long as she remained unmarried, and left to his daughters what had been his first wife’s personal property. The rest he left to Edith as a life estate with the provision that at her death, his daughters would divide the estate among themselves.

Woodrow Wilson Childhood

Woodrow Wilson was born Thomas Woodrow Wilson on December 28, 1856, to Jessie Janet Woodrow and Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister. Tommy, as he was called in his youth, was the third of four children to grow up in the Wilsons’ warm, studious and devout household. The family lived all over the South, moving from Staunton, Virginia to Augusta, Georgia in Tommy’s first year, to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1870, where Reverend Wilson taught at the Columbia Theological Seminary (he began teaching in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1874).

Less than stellar in school scholars now think that Wilson had a form of dyslexia, Reverend Wilson rigorously trained his first son in oratory and debate, which became a particular passion for the boy. He enrolled at nearby Davidson College, but he transferred to Princeton in 1875 (known as the College of New Jersey until 1896). Wilson went on to study law at the University of Virginia, and earned his Ph.D. in political science and history at Johns Hopkins University.

Wilson’s dream job was a professorship at Princeton, which he achieved in 1890, becoming the university’s 13th president in 1902. It was largely due to Wilson’s efforts that the College of New Jersey evolved into the prestigious Princeton University. In addition to a focus on innovative curriculum upgrades, he was always voted the most popular teacher on campus, renowned for his caring demeanor and high ideals. But it was his oratory skill that brought him renown beyond the university setting.

Where is Woodrow Wilson buried?

He was interred in a sarcophagus in Washington National Cathedral and is the only president interred in the nation’s capital.

How did Woodrow Wilson die?

On February 3, 1924, Wilson died at home of a stroke and other heart-related problems at age 67.”

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, following one of the nation’s more unusual elections: Wilson ran as a Democratic opposing the incumbent William Howard Taft, but Theodore Roosevelt, unhappy with his successor, ran as a third party candidate, essentially splitting the Republican vote, ensuring Wilson’s win.